The Discoverer (58 page)

And when I did not come up with an answer, or would not give an answer,
could
not give an answer, the string of her necklace snapped, apparently without her being anywhere near it, as if supernatural powers were at work. Pearls sprayed everywhere, a precious, white shower falling to the floor.

During a long period of the life that now lies behind me I felt – for reasons beyond my comprehension – the urge to seek out a worthy mission. How should one spend one’s days? Searching for pearls to thread onto a string? Or should one quite simply create new conditions, seek out another sort of string?

When I joined NRK Television and embarked upon what those who like to exaggerate have described as one of the most influential careers in
post-war
Norway, no one knew that as far as I was concerned I was in retirement. My real working life was already at an end. My Project X. As far as I was concerned, the rest of my life was going to be a real dawdle, involving no great hazards. I began my job as an announcer. I might just as well have begun work as a lighthouse keeper.

In memory my Project X is long since reduced to two activities – plus the echo of some contrapuntal wonders from Bach’s
Die Kunst der Fuge
. One of these involved crouching down between two gooseberry bushes in a garden, gazing at a cross spider. The other entailed sitting in state atop a great portal between life and learning, at a desk piled high with books on the cosmos. As a sideline I am sure I could have written a treatise on
Araneus diadematus
. At the very least I should have foreseen the discovery of Pluto’s moon.

I would be twenty before I found my calling – and I have no hesitation in using such a highfalutin word. I had had an idea that I would wind up at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics right from that day at school when a succession of maps whipped up, one after the other, to reveal a stunning poster of the solar system at the very back, like Truth itself. But I did not opt for astrophysics in order to study the cosmos, I wanted only to use the subject, and the reading room that went with it, as a base camp in an
expedition
to other, I was about to say higher, objectives. I was occasionally heard to say to fellow students: ‘I’m drawing up a new map of the universe.’

It was at this point that all the thoughts that had been running around in my head since the day when I sat amid an avalanche of books, looking at the bare bookshelves in Karen Mohr’s bedroom and waiting for a ham omelette, crystallised into the obvious mission, the Project. In a flash I knew: this is what I was born for. As a child I had always liked the standard adult question: ‘What are you going to be when you grow up.’ Because this told me that I was going to be
something
. Not just
be
. Several times already – with a certainty that I did not dare to reveal – I had had the feeling that I was a wonder, but only now did I feel myself to be fully evolved; it was a long time since I had had the sensation of dying, only to live on as a broader person. I was ready. I could almost hear a voice saying: ‘The hour has come.’

I am not so much of a fool that I cannot laugh at it now. Nonetheless, this phase in my life deserves to be described as it was: utterly serious and totally devoid of self-irony. I knew I did not have all the time in the world. Blame my impatience, if you will, on an exceptional teacher from my high school years, a man who may have been a notorious sceptic and atheist, but
who, after a terrible disaster at sea in which he lost all of his closest family, became a deeply religious person – which is not to say that he became a sad, old misery guts on that score. He always wore a beret, like a painter. I often thought that he and my neighbour Karen Mohr would have made a good match. ‘Teaching is the greatest of all the arts,’ he said. During those years I did not go to school, I sat at the feet of a guru. ‘Use your head today,
tomorrow
it may be too late,’ he said in every second class. ‘Right now, you have no preconceived opinions. And only now, for all too short a time, do you have the necessary measure of naivety.’ According to our astute schoolmaster, no one had an original thought after they turned twenty-five. By then one was set. Almost all significant discoveries, particularly within science, were made by relatively young people. Just look at Newton!

All at once the Project was tantalisingly clear to me. I would discover a new way of thinking, a way which lay dormant within us. I would break down the bars behind which human cognition had been confined by the existing categories. I have to restrain myself here – I can see that the more I say, the more overheated and nebulous and crazy it will sound. Let me put it this way: it was a task worthy of Atlas himself, it was an attempt to lift something colossal, to form the basis for a higher heaven. And yet to me it seemed an imperative and manifestly rational task.

Looking back on it, it is easy to see what I was fighting against: Melvil Dewey’s classification system. Because even though it was only a tool for organising books in a library, to me it was the crowning example of a mode of thought which had paralyzed our potential for evolving as human beings. Ever since my visit to Deichman’s Potala Palace with Karen Mohr, clad in sober grey, I had been unhappy about Melvil Dewey’s method of arranging a large collection of books. His system, with its ten main classes had cemented notions of the importance of the different branches of knowledge and of the relationship between them. I was reminded of my own bafflement and lack of vision that time when Granny dragged out all those small boxes full of crystal droplets. Who would ever have thought that together they would form a
glittering
chandelier?

Dewey’s system belonged, moreover, to another world, not to a life in which people’s thoughts and ideas were forever changing, in which fields of knowledge expanded in the same way as the universe did. I never forgot the class – a Norwegian class, at that, earmarked for a review of adverbial clauses – in which our unconventional junior-high teacher told us about the
explosion
of life forms traceable in the Cambrian system. I had a strong sense of living in a new and revolutionary Cambria, in an epoch when everything was
gathering speed, when new scientific discoveries were piling up all around us. Dewey’s system was based on a simple, single-celled form of life, so to speak. But now new hybrids were bursting forth, fabulous unguessed-at branches of learning.

What interested me, more than the libraries and the classification system as such, was the organisation of human knowledge. I wanted to promote a different understanding of the collective power of all the arts and sciences; I meant to draw up a new map, on a new projection, with different names for all the regions; I wished to create a springboard for unforeseen discoveries. In glimpses I saw, with a shudder of apprehension almost, the Project’s aim: a new unity. New connections between the various parts of the whole. The chance of a new kind of dialogue. If mankind was to unfold, then our
knowledge
would also have to be unfolded. Maybe Project X was born on that day in my childhood when I unwrapped a beautiful map of the world from what everybody thought was a filthy, crumpled wad of cloth.

This task instinctively appealed to me. It was all about depth. I wanted to be a person who worked in depth. I often thought of another of the many keen assertions made by our master in junior high: no one now had the energy to care about the big picture, he said, standing in front of a blackboard covered in circles and dotted lines. Any expert today who claimed to know more than one per mil of the existing knowledge in his field was bluffing. And if you were not even anywhere close to knowing your own discipline, how were you supposed to understand the relationship between your subject and other subjects? The sciences in our day were incapable of communicating with one another, our teacher said. And this was catastrophic. Most fruitful theories sprang from the wedding of two ideas from two unrelated fields. He was right. At my best moments I felt a kinship with Thor Heyerdahl.

My life has been a balancing act between the hope of being a wonder, and the fear that I was a fool. I remember how sometimes in maths tests I could juggle quite brilliantly with abstract quantities, while at others I could make the most unforgivably stupid mistakes, could hardly add two and two together.

I once asked Margrete why she had kept those four butterflies, the ones she had caught as a child, hanging in a frame on the wall. ‘I like butterflies,’ she said. ‘And I’m interested in them from a medical point of view, too. They have the most amazing immune system. It has us stumped. We can inject them with cholera or typhus bacteria. But they don’t get sick.’ I tended to think of Margrete in much the same way. She was a doctor, there was no way she could ever get sick.

Luckily, my choice of life project went well with a need for concealment which had not lessened with the years. As an astrophysics student I had access to the big reading room on the top floor of the Physics Building, a lofty, bright, square room. Here, in the yeasty atmosphere generated by the deep
concentration
of countless students, I could wrestle with my Atlas project, well-hidden, but at the same time situated on a vital axis. Beneath me lay the entrance to the campus, a portal through which thousands passed every day. And from the terrace outside the reading room I could drink in the inspiring view of the city and the fjord.

This was the most unsociable, most reclusive phase of my life. And
possibly
the only time when I actually did some hard work. I can shake my head at it now, but I cannot deny that I was very content. I had a tiny flat in
Hegdehaugsveien
, but spent most of my time in the reading room surrounded, for appearances’ sake, by astrophysics textbooks, while reading other works entirely and jotting down, or occasionally sketching out, thoughts and ideas on sheets of paper which gradually grew into a pile as bulky and fanciful as an old Family Bible.

My frame of reference was the Dewey Decimal System, and in order to know what exactly I was protesting against and wished to improve upon I learned the names of the ten main classes, the hundred subdivisions and the thousands of sections or subjects by heart. I can still remember a lot of them, 786: Keyboard Instruments, 787: Stringed Instruments, 788: Wind
Instruments
. Or 597: Fish, 598: Birds, 599: Mammals. To begin with, I put a lot of effort into tossing these topics around in my head, to see if they might fall into other constellations, with other names. Since, on paper, I was studying astronomy I thought of the stars, thought to myself that this was like drawing new lines between those points of light, creating different signs from those which had been employed ever since the days of the Ancient Greeks. Why 295: Zoroastrianism, 296: Judaism, 297: Islam? Why not invent a new group in which string instruments, birds and Zoroastrianism were put together.

For the first time, during these years, I felt motivated to read. Or rather: I browsed, frantically skimming page after page, hoping to spot ideas, hints, clues which would help me with my project. I scrutinised the other
classification
systems, from Francis Bacon’s and Henry Evelyn Bliss’s to that devised by the far-sighted mathematician Dr S. R. Ranganathan, before expanding my studies to include every endeavour to organise the world of thoughts and things. I delved with a will into the zoological and botanical systems – in
particular
Carl von Linné’s twenty-four classes, as well as his optimistic
breakdown
into genus and species and the resultant two-part Latin name. I pored over medical books on anatomy, I studied the periodic table, I struggled until
I was blue in the face to grasp the reasoning behind the twenty-eight
magnificent
volumes of Diderot et al.’s great French Encyclopedia, I even looked at various books on mazes in all their historical forms.

I sat in the reading room – I saw myself as being in a kind of academic outside-left position – enlightening myself on the infinite variety of human knowledge: biology, economics, meteorology. I read and read, leafed through book after book. By bringing all my mental powers to bear, I eventually decided what I considered to be the main branches of learning, the
fundamental
categories – I gave them new names, instead of such long-winded appellations as philosophy and natural science – then I split these up into smaller sections and – this was the hardest part – devised a sequence for these main and secondary disciplines which might disclose new inter-
category
relationships.

I sat on the top of the Physics Building, a gateway to the seat of learning in Oslo, a little cathedral, thanks to Per Krohg’s frescoes in the entrance hall, but I was studying neither physics nor astrophysics, I was reorganising all the world’s knowledge. I sat in the reading room, month after month, in that yeasty atmosphere, trying out idea after idea. I created divisions according to an evolutionary system, based on how things appeared to have emerged in the course of time. I arranged the main classes in the order in which they ought to be studied by someone seeking to be educated. I created systems which progressed from the general to the specific. I tried another sequence which ran from the specific to the general. In one experiment I began with the minor groups and subjects, not the main classes, then drew these groups together to form a bigger picture; attempted, you might even say, to get them to merge together of their own accord, working from the bottom upwards. I tried
everything
: for a long time, in one of my drafts Ant was a main class, in another I had two categories entitled The Actually Human and The Covertly Human.

It’s odd. I have always believed that these were the years when I thought least about Margrete. I see now that I must have been thinking about her all the time. That she may have been the motive behind the whole Project. That this was another swim across an impossibly wide body of water.